johnmossmysteryblog

The Scholar, Still Dead

2011-10-10T10:51:00.000-07:00

After forty rewrites, this doesn't seem much different from the first one. A little punchier, I hope.

When an elderly professor turns up dead on Philosophers Walk in the heart of Toronto, fellow members of the Bacon Society are not surprised he was murdered. Enthralled by the Renaissance rogue and scholar, Sir Francis Bacon, this unlikely band of misfits also shares a profound loathing for the dead Mephistophiles who had been their leader. They draw Detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan into their midst as the investigation moves from the university environs to a grand summer house in Muskoka, and reaches from the new millenium back into the bleakest events of the twentieth century. The Dead Scholar is a drawing room thriller and a black comedy, an intellectual puzzle and a complex study of quixotic characters whose lives intersect in a web of dark secrets they cannot escape. It is a world where Quin and Morgan find themselves quite at home.

Hockey?

2011-10-08T06:45:00.000-07:00

If Don Cherry developed dementia, would anyone notice?

The Dead Scholar

2011-10-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

This is the blurb I've created for the back cover and promo material for the next Quin and Morgan mystery. I'm putting it out here in case anyone thinks it can be tweaked, should be altered, must be entirely revised! Thanks for your help.

THE DEAD SCHOLAR

When an elderly professor is found dead on Philosophers Walk in the heart of Toronto, fellow members of the Bacon Society are not surprised to learn he was murdered. Enthralled by the Renaissance rogue and scholar, Sir Francis Bacon, and bound by their shared loathing for the dead man, this incongruous band of eccentrics draws investigating detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan into their midst. Set in the university environs and Muskoka at the dawn of the new millennium, The Dead Scholar reaches back into the darkest events of the twentieth century. This is a drawing room thriller, an intellectual puzzle, and a complex study of unforgettable characters whose lives intersect in a web of dark secrets they cannot escape. It is a world where Quin and Morgan find themselves quite at home.

Opening Books

2011-07-14T16:52:00.000-07:00

I've just posted answers to 10 questions asked by Open Book Ontario. It was a pleasure doing them, so I thought I'd post their address and you can see for yourself—

http://www.openbookontario.com/news/ten_questions_john_moss

Canada Impossible

2011-06-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

In the spring of 2006, I was Visiting Professor of Canadian Literature at the Universität Wien and invited to give the opening address at the International Graduate Conference for Canadian Studies in German speaking Countries in the presence, among other dignitaries, of Mme Gervais-Vidricaire, Canadian Ambassador to Austria.

For the past five weeks I have been living in Austria and teaching at the Department for English and North American Studies at the University of Vienna. Through the spring of 1980 I taught Canadian literature in West Berlin. During the early 1960s I spent a lot of time with German sun-worshippers and anarchists on Ibiza, long before it became expensive, and back then I travelled in Germany and Austria through several impoverished seasons by what used to be called ‘auto-stop.’ In Waterloo County, southwestern Ontario, my great grandparents on my mother’s side spoke German, not only at home but in the community. When my Scottish grandmother turned up in the 1880s, moving from nearby Granton, Ontario, she had to learn German to work as the first telegraphist in the local post office. When I was a child and she was very old, she would gleefully evoke her mother-in-law by speaking English with a theatrical German accent.
It has been a while now, living in Vienna, since I first began dreaming in German. Appropriately, in the city of Freud, when I wake up I have no idea what I was dreaming about. The German language has become as familiar to me as my own and yet it remains largely a closed dimension in the parallel worlds of my mind. No matter how carefully I listen, whether to people speaking around me or to my echoing genes, German refuses to make sense. I have no facility with languages at all. Even English often leads me into obscurity and confusion. Therefore it is humbling to stand before a gathering of people who speak not only English but German, and probably French, and perhaps other languages, as well.
I am here as a Canadian. That seems to be my primary credential. Many of you at this conference know more about aspects of Canadian culture and Canada as a geophysical presence, about Canadian politics, history, economics, natural resources, native peoples, bicultural symbiotics, immigrant statistics, multicultural anomalies, postcolonial angst. I know about being as a Canadian, but that only has meaning in the Heideggarian sense. Dasein. My awareness of my own existential condition is from a particular and unique Canadian perspective. This might qualify me to speak as a representative human in the world but not as an exemplary Canadian, a collectivity wherein I exist as a singularity of no great genius or eminence, although with a penchant for the public display of modesty which is a particularly Canadian characteristic.
A good part of my academic career has been devoted to making generalizations about Canada, usually in the disguise of informed opinions; sometimes, especially in more recent years, these opinions are embedded in poetry and fiction. Imagination has been necessary because there is no such thing as Canada. This makes Canada an existential singularity – its non-existance, then, proof that such a thing as Canada exists. Canada in the Heideggarian sense exists in being what it is not.
Samuel Beckett would have understood: Canada is an impossibility. My authority for saying this is that I am Canadian.
“You can write whatever you want about Vienna, it will always be true.” This was written by the Viennese writer Hans Weigel in a marvel of dialectical redundancy, proving by making his statement that his statement, in fact, is the truth. He wrote this, of course, in German and perhaps meant something quite different. What we understand, here, together, in English, might not be what he meant. And if you are quietly translating my English translation of Hans Weigel back into German, you might not even see the Canadian connection.
Perhaps we should take a different approach. Canada is not a blank slate. Just because quite possibly there is no such thing as Canada and just because whatever you say about Canada is true, no matter how contradictory, no matter how contrary, Canada is not tabula rasa. Nor is it a whole that is either more or less than the sum of its parts. Nor is it what is left of North America when you take away the United State and Mexico. In fact, if the U.S. ceased to exist, Canada would collapse as a ribbon of desiccated snow along the north bank of the Rio Grande. If you were to arrange what each of you knows about, believes in, desires from Canada, the result would not be a mosaic signifying Canada from a Germanic perspective. It would be more like the proverbial elephant, described by a cohort of the blind from a variety of perspectives. Each of you might be correct; the chances of assembling your separate visions into an elephant, however, or a mosaic representing an elephant is infinitesimal.
In Austria, history and geography converge. The same might be said of all the nations in what we peremptorily call ‘the old world.’ ‘The old world’ is a term that seems to mean those parts of the planet wherein historical texts were devised to record the progress of what is determined by textual analysis to be ‘civilized.’ Given that the indigenous people of Australia settled there some fifty-thousand years ago, long before the endangered cave drawings were inscribed at Les Escaux, long before Europeans exterminated their Neanderthal cousins, given that the native peoples of America were there for at least twenty thousand years before the Vikings landed at L’Anse aux Meadows in New-found-land, it seems odd to call their worlds ‘new.’ Yet, we name those people aboriginals as if they were a geographical feature of the landscape, with a past but no story. And if history is text, not heritage, then perhaps that is true. In real nations, such as Austria and Scotland, history and geography are virtually inseparable, the shifting boundaries and diverse causes of generations indelibly inscribed on the bruised and battered surface of the earth.
In the United States, history has subdued geography, drawn it into submission through grand schemes like the Hoover Dam and a manifest destiny in which conquest was not of other nations but of the land itself. With armies and engineers, farmers and entrepreneurs, Americans staked out the heart of a continent and imposed a revolutionary history upon everything within its grasp. In parts of Central and South America, history has yet to bring the natural world into submission, but not for want of trying. There are vast areas of rainforest that will not surrender, yet they, too, will finally dwindle to dust in the face of global atrocities. History, like cancer, will eventually kill off what it cannot control.
Canada, subject to the same threats, is different. History is one thing; geography another. If, in the U.S., geography was subdued by history, and in the Old World, from Ireland to Israel, Japan to Viet Nam, geography has been subsumed by history, in Canada it was the imposition of geography as a system of measurement, of incising distance and direction upon the land, that made history possible. If elsewhere, history and geography ultimately converge, in Canada they refuse to do so. We have history, yes. Much of it was written by surveyors as they superimposed new names over old, making every map of Canada a palimpsest – native names that endured five hundred generations suddenly over-written by strangers with an alien tongue. Some of it was written in the ledgers that trading post storekeepers sent ‘home,’ with notes on market conditions; some was scripted by permanent tourists like the Strickland sisters, or by subversives like Anna Jameson and Mina Hubbard. And much of our history happened somewhere else, on the battlefields of Europe, in South Africa, in Singapore, among foreign diplomats at Paris and Ghent.
Attempts have been made to trace our national narrative, most famously through the fur trade, and in popular accounts through the building of the railroads, or the distribution and ultimate uses of Eaton’s Catalogue. But a cursory survey of Canada today reveals how inadequate these historiographic paradigms actually are. For a story to become history, it must make the collective enterprise seem its inevitable outcome. One can believe the United States would be otherwise, but for the Wild West. Yet millions of amphibious rodents slaughtered to make hats for European gentry are nothing in romance or myth upon which to found a nation, and their sacrifice bears little on the minds of contemporary Canadians. It is the difference between metaphor and metonym. Beavers no more embody the story of our past than the seal hunt does of our present, or the slaughter houses of Chicago do of the American dream.
History and geography in Canada form an uneasy alliance. One of the reasons is time. In Canada we are never far from reminders of how ancient is the universe and our human place within it. We are aware, even from the city’s edge, of the vast excoriated surface of the Earth gleaming under the sun through five and a half times zones (Newfoundland declaring its difference on the half hour); we talk endlessly in Tim Hortons over coffee, in offices and schools, over neighbourhood fences and to complete strangers, of weather systems rolling for days, even weeks, across our sovereign landscape; we are aware of how fragile is our tenure on the planet, by virtue of our vast wilderness, which the native peoples call home. We are a very old country, geographically. Yet our history has no roots. It is like lichen on Arctic boulders, a mixture of algae and fungus, but with no reality of its own, clinging to the surface of the rock.
Ask Canadians about history. They will tell you about the Greeks and the Persians. Hebrews and Egyptians are pushed a little to the side as religion and myth. They might tell you about Rome, or the interminable quarrels of Europe, or the European imperial project abroad; or inform you that the Gettysburg address was Abraham Lincoln’ postal code during the Revolution. We sometimes get confused. You might hear of Chinese dynasties or Mogul empires. Or of conquistadores and buccaneers. Ask Canadians about history: you will hear almost nothing of Canada. For a few minutes on November 11th every year, we celebrate our valiant warriors, but this is nostalgia, not history. We make other gestures, we celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday, we celebrate our hockey victory over the Soviets in 1972, we celebrate the brief life of a one-legged runner, Terry Fox. It is not that things did not happen in Canada, but rather that, for the most part, we choose to forget.
This is in part our colonial legacy; by definition, history happened elsewhere. In part, it is due to our evolutionary progress toward democratic sovereignty, such as it is; there were no signal events, only significant dates. Partly, it is because we live so close to ‘concept America’; it is difficult to see our reflection mirrored in the rocket’s red glare. And finally, perhaps for these other reasons, we now erase ourselves in a bland mixture of humility and arrogance under the aegis of multiculturalism: do not fear assimilation for we are so empty as to be infinitely accommodating.
Is there such a thing as culture if no-one knows about it? As a postmodernist, I’m used to telling jokes no-one gets. It is almost a measure of my humour’s success that it goes unappreciated, and I tend to feel a vague sense of disappointment when someone smiles. But if an entire culture goes unrecognized, perhaps it is more than a quirkiness to be overlooked or admired. This is not my judgement, that Canadian culture does not exist, that the term itself, ‘Canadian culture,’ is apparently an oxymoron. It is probably not the judgement of people working for the National Film Board or activists funded by the Canada Council in one or another of its various guises; it is probably not the judgement of Canadian Studies specialists, such as yourselves, each of whom has a different notion of what Canadian culture is and why it is difficult to grasp; nor the judgement of professional Canadians working for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Otherwise, you will be hard pressed to find someone who admits to Canadian culture as an empirical fact.
Culture has enlivened the Canadian sensibility from the beginning, of course, when, following the arrival of Europeans to our illimitable shores, we first conceived ourselves a separable place in the world. Culture washed across us in waves – from France, the British Isles, Germany, from Eastern Europe, from Japan, China, Southeast Asia, from what we awkwardly know as the Indian subcontinent, and always from the south, where Americans commodified populist culture as a major export, and increasingly, rising like springwater from below, from the people, the First Nations, who were here when the others arrived; culture washing over us seems only to have worn us away. Perhaps, the only thing distinguishing our culture is that, like Atlantis beneath the sea, it haunts by its absence and is under constant erasure.
Only a few years ago, a minister for cultural affairs in the federal government declared there is no such thing as Canadian culture. I cannot remember who she was – to do so is like remembering an assassin’s name while forgetting the victims – but I documented her precise words in a book called The Paradox of Meaning. In any case, so many other politicians have urged upon us the same facile and cowardly denial of Canada as a cultural entity that there is nothing extraordinary in the minister’s unseemly effacement. It seems a characteristic of the political profession, in Canada, to cast no shadow. This happens, of course, either when there is wondrous illumination or there is absolute darkness.
Do not think it is only federal politicians who stand shadowless and gaze into mirrors in an inversion of vampires, seeing only their own reflection, the background being utterly void. Last year the Government of Ontario considered granting, ex cathedra, legal jurisdiction to Sharia Law within a self-defining community throughout the province.
Quebec, of course, for all its sad legal battles over language, has a culture. Only a few years ago we almost tore the country apart, and left indelible scars, by refusing to allow Quebec the constitutional designation, ‘distinct.’ We would be damned if Quebec is a distinct society, we would be damned if it is not! And the rest of Canada, each region, each federal riding, is for electoral purposes distinct, emphatically so, so long as that appellation is not donned as a mantle of disaffection. You can see what I mean about the paradox of meaning: cultural distinctiveness is not to be confused with political difference. Politicians might allow Quebec its undeniable personality, based on the confluence of time, space, and being, or, to put it less grandly, on the coming together of history, geography, and culture over an extended period, sufficient to make it distinct. But Canada as a whole, which paradoxically includes Quebec, is simply – not family, not community, not alliance – Canada is simply a consensus.
Now let me clarify. We are a very cultured people. Well no, we are not a people. Let me say that again: we are very cultured, notwithstanding our lack of peopleness. ‘Notwithstanding’ is a very Canadian word. Those familiar with our constitutional documents will vouch for that. Perhaps, if we are to uncover evidence for Canadian culture we should start with the word, ‘notwithstanding.’ There must be some idea of Canada that can stand for the whole. We are highly educated, we are well informed, we are relatively open-minded. But if we cannot imagine ourselves in the world, how can we expect the world to imagine us?
I think it would be safe, even in such a cultural treasury as Vienna, to say that the term ‘culture’ in relation to national being does not refer to the arts, to enlightenment and the refined sensibility. Rather, it describes the depth of shared values and social behavior by which a particular people experience their collective existence. In the past, such values and behavior have been determined by racial or ethnic homogeneity, religion, language, common laws, continuity of customs – all usually, but not always, circumscribed by geographic limits and historical continuity. Quebec, by these cultural measures, is certainly a nation. Each tribal unit of native peoples in Canada, as determined by negotiated or imposed boundaries, is known as a First Nation. Some of these consist of thousands, others of only a handful of people. The Inuit of Canada, who participate in a circumpolar genealogy, are not a nation, since their borders for convenience are the same as those of the country to which they are host. Most Inuit would probably refuse the contained and limiting implications of the term. They are free people upon the land, ownership of which is a logical absurdity. They are proof, perhaps, that while a nation must certainly have or be a culture, a coherent culture is not necessarily a nation.
What, then, is Canada, if not impossible. Austria is an idea that can be held in the mind, without knowing exactly what that means. If someone were to challenge the notion, our several definitions would inevitably overlap. One can have an idea of Austria, and Mozart and Freud, the Habsburg dynasty, World Wars, alpine scenery, the governor of California, these will all be there. An idea of the United States, diverse as it may be, and often idealized as ’the American dream,’ will include Washington and the Constitution, Lincoln and the Civil War, the Kennedys, cowboys, gangsters, Marilyn, the Mississippi, James Dean, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and probably the governor of California, as well.
What about the idea of Canada? What are the iconic names, images, conditions or events that converge in our collective awareness of ourselves, in your conception of us as a singular entity? Superman and Austin Powers originated in Canada, but we don’t think of them. Mounties and mountains? Many Canadians have seen neither. Maple leaves, Maple Leafs – foliage of trees unknown in most of the country except on a flag designed by a political party; a hockey team as much reviled as revered. The North? North is a direction determined by the Earth’s axis – despite the opinion of many, especially in Canada, it is not a place. Moral vision? We are fiercely polite. Political vision? No. Our federal political system is of accidental design and incidental efficiency. Is there an idea of Canada based on nostalgia – not really, when the past seems vaguely an embarrassment? On a dream? We dream only, in occasional panic, of having no dreams.
Where, then, does an immigrant to Canada arrive? If we seem a nation only by political expediency, and a country by virtue of adjectives describing our size, our diversity, our weather, and we seem culturally transparent, pathologically reticent about our past or future, diffident about the foundations of our laws and values (as if we had none, before our very recent Charter of Rights and Freedoms), then what are newcomers, who are strongly encouraged to maintain the customs and culture they fled, what are they to become? The answer, of course, is Canadian. In a contemporary world, Canada is emerging as a postcolonial multicultural anomaly. We are the first postmodern nation.
In a world where the pride of nations leads to devastating moral righteousness, after twentieth century nationalisms led to imponderable waste, Canada can serve as the model for difference. The terrible clash of historical inevitabilities will be mute if history, itself, ceases to be of importance. Whoever it was who said, those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, was wrong, dead wrong. It is those who do know history who are its minions, its slaves, who are driven to rewrite it again and again. History is not the repository of virtue but the breeding ground of folly and vice.
Canada breaks all the rules of what it is to be a nation. Of course we have a past, but we choose the present. And of course we have a culture, but we live it, day to day. It is not something we think much about, but just try suggesting we join the United States and see where it gets you. Who cares if we mumble about health care and hockey, the right to ban handguns, bilingual cornflakes. We know who we are. We also know we are not an inviolable chorus or choir, but a lovely cacophony of multiple voices. We are not my mother’s Canada, which was neo-European, nor her mother’s Canada, which was British, nor her mother’s, which was pioneer, nor hers, shaped by land-clearing settler-invaders, nor any other, back nine generations to my earliest forbears who fled the American Revolution, my Mohawk grandmother from the Finger Lakes District of New York State, my Mennonite grandmother from Pennsylvania. Nor is my own fiercely sovereign Canada that of my children, which is multicultural, multiracial, nor of their children, my six grandchildren, which is yet to be determined. We are a community in motion. It is only in stasis we become dangerous to ourselves or to others.
And, of course, we are geography, we’re the empty place on CNN weather maps. In Mercator projections we’re impossibly large; in geography texts, impossibly variegated, absurdly complex. We have the longest ocean coastline in the world. It would be as hard to miss us on maps as to draw our margins from memory. Perhaps because of size and diversity, perhaps because we have learned from the original peoples whose descendents are still among us, we do not possess the land with borders and boundaries, with laws and deeds and government treaties, and certainly not with walls, which are the greatest geographic folly of all. But we are here: understand this, we are an ancient land, a land unlimited by human consciousness. Geography may have conspired with history to give us our present shape and generate the illusion of ownership, but we are merely custodians. And even without maps, we know where we are.
Many of you who are experts in Canadian Studies have been to Canada. Once there, you were in no doubt where you were. From Vancouver to Halifax, Comox to Heart’s Content, there is something about Canada that says you are there. Is it because we drink double-doubles, admire cops, smoke pot, smile a lot, hate winter, love snow, reject -isms and -ologies, and always say thank you? We break the rules of what it means to be a nation. Somehow the word ‘country’ might seem more appropriate, but we break the rules of what it is to be a country, as well. Yet, when you cross from the U.S. into Canada you know you are there; when you get off the plane or the ship from elsewhere, you know you are there.
Imagine dreaming in English, and waking up to realize you only speak German. Imagine me, in Vienna, surrounded by a language I do not understand, immersed in the baroque splendour of a culture steeped in the past, within national boundaries established by armies and alliances, in a world where maps do not make countries but countries make maps. I know from its splendid coffees and pastry, Vienna is empirically real, yet so much is encoded in ineffable diction, I cannot make it quite real in my mind. Like music. Like Haydn and Mozart and Schubert – we know these men as a visceral experience but not who they were. Not who they are. As we listen, sensibility and sense, feelings and reason, reach out and touch each other, even caress, but they do not converge. Music, of course, is impossible. If there were no-one to hear, it would not exist. That is what postmodern Canada is like; that is what it is like to be a Canadian.

For Robert Kroetsch

2011-06-25T15:13:00.000-07:00

A friend since 1974, Bob Kroetsch was killed in a car accident a couple of days ago. I may write something in his memory, but right now the best thing I can do is refer you to a posting by my daughter, Laura, on the Canadian Literature website. She says so much, so well, and manages to carry that wonderfully distinctive Kroetsch cadence into her own prose. He's a part of the Canadian language and even death can't take that away from us.
Check out what she says at:

http://canlit.ca/news.php?news=88

The Reviewer Reviewed: Mystery Maven

2011-06-18T12:37:00.000-07:00

Reviews are the best connection between writers and readers. As a writer, I can’t always know what readers want, but I do know that when they invest money and time in my novels, it’s important to give them value. Two things, review and sales, are the gauge of how I’m doing. I put more trust in reviewers I’ve learned to trust. Sales can be very misleading. They don’t always provide the best estimation of quality and I fall among those writers who think quality of the writing and of the reader’s appreciation are paramount. I want to be enjoyed by good readers and not just define good readers as those who appreciate me!
A fine review of “Reluctant Dead” came out today on the Mystery Maven blog. Now that’s the sort of thoughtful review any writer loves to receive. Take a look:
http://mysterymavencdn.blogspot.com/2011/06/mystery-review.html

Place, Character, Action!

2011-06-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

Crime Writers of Canada asked for a brief note about location and setting. Here's what I sent them:

Location plays an important role in my newest Quin and Morgan mystery, 'Reluctant Dead,' released in mid-June. Location is never simply a background in my novels; it determines action. In 'Still Waters,' both the Rosedale setting in Toronto and the area around Blair in Waterloo County are integral to the developing mystery as well as to the characters’ lives. 'Grave Doubts' again features Toronto, which is fitting since David Morgan and Miranda Quin are both Detective Sergeants who work homicide with the Toronto Police Service, but it is the confusion of the historical and contemporary city due to a corpse revealed in the demolition of a colonial house that leads to suspense and horror. The resolution takes place in the Owen Sound area and, for a truly harrowing episode, underwater in a wreck near Tobermoray. In 'Reluctant Dead,' Quin takes a sabbatical to Easter Island in the South Pacific to write a mystery novel and stumbles into a plot with international implications. Morgan discovers a murder on Toronto Island that leads him to the Canadian Arctic. Ultimately, the two stories connect. Easter Island, with its fabled past, and Baffin Island, with its austere and forbidding conditions, lead Morgan and Miranda through chilling adventures that are only resolved when they get back together in downtown Toronto.

Workable?

2011-06-10T15:23:00.000-07:00

Received a lovely review from Margaret Cannon in The Globe and Mail last Saturday (June 4th). My new novel in the Quin and Morgan series, "Reluctant Dead," isn't officially out until next week, so I'm really pleased. The opening paragraph is fascinating, because I know the review is a virtual rave but one particular word weighs it down. Read it and see:

"The team of Miranda Quin and David Morgan, members of the Toronto Police Service homicide squad, is now three books in, and it’s clear that John Moss has a winning combo. Quin and Morgan are professionally and fictionally workable, and Reluctant Dead is the best so far."

"Workable!"
I'd rather they were mesmerizing, enthralling, inspiring, engaging, mind-blowing, you name it. But not to complain. Margaret Canon is the doyenne of reviewers, and I'd rather be workable for her, in such an enthusiastic context, than sheer genius for others.

Waking Up Cranky

2011-03-21T07:06:00.000-07:00

Listening to ‘The Current’ this morning on CBC radio, I was struck by the shrill efforts of their correspondent in Japan to stir up a story linking the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the current nuclear crisis following the earthquake and tsunami. He seemed deeply offended that no-one would admit to his simplistic and bombastic argument. And so, rising to the edge of hysteria, he made a story out of the fact that there was no story to make. And all the while, he insisted on using the non-word “nucular,” by which I assume he meant “nuclear.” Shades of Reagan and George W. From the CBC, good grief! Nucular is ignorant and we have a right to expect better. Next they’ll be talking about the “Artic,” instead of the “Arctic.” And dropping the word “who,” when they can use “that” incorrectly in its place.
Sometimes fretting the details is a good way to cope in a troubling and troublesome world! Especially when you wake up cranky. Now back to writing mysteries ...

Welcome to the World

2011-03-02T15:49:00.000-08:00

Write as many books as you want, publish them if you can, and they remain your offspring forever. They are not your children. Children grow up and that’s a good thing. There is sadness in that, as well as immeasurable satisfaction, especially when they make you so proud to be a continuing part of their lives. I was blessed with a new grandchild this week, my seventh, a boy. Joel entered this world and the world has changed. Marginally, perhaps, but it will never be quite the same. That’s what happens with books; the least of them is like butterfly wings stirring the air. Welcome, Joel. It’s good to have you with us. May your wings stir up a memorable storm.

Honour/able

2011-02-17T15:03:00.000-08:00

I do not often sign petitions and I am not a member of the Liberal Party but I just signed the Liberal call for the resignation of Bev Oda, for her dispicable behavior which demeans the position of cabinet minister and demeans us collectively in the process. Politics, it seems, is the last refuge of scoundrels. If a person is to be designated the Honourable or the Right Honourable, it should be because they deserve it. Ms. Oda has behaved disgracefully, and the Prime Minister has behaved disgracefully. They do not deserve any title other than “Politician,” which is a shameful honourific in today’s federal politics.

Blog, A Verb

2011-02-09T06:48:00.000-08:00

I wonder how many blogs are about blogging. The winter is rolling along and I haven’t blogged in months. It isn’t that I haven’t thought about it. To blog or not to blog! I’ve been busy but the whole point of blogging is to share what you’re busy doing and thinking, so that’s no excuse. I did have a quadruple bypass, but that’s no excuse, either. The surgery is well behind me and I have more energy now than I’ve had in the last few years. So. I’ve been writing a new mystery, re-writing, polishing, re-polishing, and I’m at last pleased with it, but will go back and re-re-write, re-re-polish, and see what we have. A good novel, I hope. A mystery called “Lindstrom Alone.” It’s the first in a series! And I’m back to tearing our house apart and re-building. This time, it’s our bedroom and master bathroom, or master bedroom and bathroom. So far, I’ve re-wired, re-plumbed, and now I’m re-panelling. I seem to be into “re.” Maybe I’ll start re-blogging!

Before the Bench in Brockville

2010-10-19T07:05:00.000-07:00

This past weekend marked the second annual Thousand Islands Writers Festival held in Brockville on the Saint Larence. Bev and I attended and I did a reading in the Saturday afternoon mystery session in the Court House. It’s difficult to imagine a more exciting, and daunting, location to read about murder and mayhem than an actual court room, especially with Judge Cosgrove, in a manner of speaking, presiding. It was memorable. I even got to address members of the jury (that part of the audience seated in the jury box). It was a bit unusual to address the court with my back to the bench, but not being a lawyer, I adjusted.

The organizers of the Festival, especially Doreen Barnes as Chair and Russ Disotell, who acted as MC, did a great job, bringing together a diverse cluster of writers and an enthusiastic gathering of readers. There were many volunteers who should be thanked, but I don’t have the names. Thank you, all. A great deal of thought went into everything from the writers’ goodie bags at the beginning to the wine and cheese celebration at the end. It all helped make this a great event.

Bev and I stayed at the Victoria Inn where the gracious host, Susan Szaraz, offers wonderfully contemporary service in a truly charming and authentic period setting (www.brockvillevictoriainn.ca/index.htm).

I do want specially to thank Jake and Pat at the Leeds County Bookstore (73 King St. West) for their enthusiastic support. From a writer’s perspective, there is nothing more gratifying than finding a bookstore where they genuinely love books and believe in the books they sell (including mine).

I would go back to the Thousand Islands Writers Festival in a minute or, in fact, next year, as a writer or as a reader and listener. Just consider the line-up this year. It was stellar. Reading with me in the mystery segment were R.J. Harlick and Janet Kellough. Also reading, on Friday and on Saturday morning, were Sarah Perry and Tish Cohen, Charlotte Gray and Roy MacSkimming, and children’s writer, Elizabeth Kelly. Due to health problems, I couldn’t be there for the entire weekend. Next time, I’ll do better.

It was a real pleasure and privilege to read with R.J. and with Janet in our session chaired by the irrepressible Russ Disotell.

It’s a pleasure to affirm that the TIWF is well on it’s way to being an institution (especially if they continue to hold readings in the Court House)!

And Brockville! What a beautiful historic city. We’ll be going back for sure, one way or another.

Hey Randy

2010-08-25T16:16:00.000-07:00

A good friend of mine just reminded me how long it’s been since I last blogged (sounds like something you’d take a laxative for). I’ve been distracted, but I’ll get back on track. I have to go in for a bit of surgery this Friday and, in a week or two, I plan on catching up on my blogs (sounds vaguely offensive, but at least I’m not going to tweet). In the last few months I’ve been forced to take things easy, but I’ve been writing with a vengeance.

The third in the Quin and Morgan series is coming out early next winter. We’re still wrestling with the title. I’d prefer The Reluctant Assassin. My publisher wants the zombiesque title, Reluctant Dead. We’ll see who holds the power here … As if!

I’m in for a a period of convalescing, so there’ll be no excuse, Randy. I’ll blog.

Vive the Difference

2010-05-17T16:55:00.000-07:00

One advantage to writing a blog read by only a few is that anything I say can have a large impact and little consequence. So, here goes.

Recently, there has been an uproar about Supreme Court judges having to be bilingual. This precludes 80% of Anglophone Canadian lawyers from consideration; but it also demands that Francophone judges be professionally adept in English, which is not so limiting only because they have had to learn English to survive in a North American world.

A generation ago, as an academic critic, long before I began writing mysteries, I was on the founding executive of The Association for Canadian and Quebecois Literatures, an academic group that de facto supported cultural difference, although it seemed horrified by the idea of political separation. I’ve always been surprised by the petulant silence in the ROC during the sovereignty debates, but surely we’ve reached a point of maturity in our parallel histories where silence is demeaning and an insult. Quebec is a nation with a National Assembly and a distinct culture which springs from our common heritage and overlaps with Canadian culture and history as a whole. Surely it deserves political autonomy. The rest of Canada will not dwindle into a cultural wasteland and Franco Canadians in the ROC will benefit from having both a Canadian homeland and a motherland in Quebec.

We have been a cereal box country long enough. Let’s join forces, Canada and Quebec, recognize each other’s autonomy, celebrate out differences, honour what we have in common, and stop fretting about René Levesque’s sad brave eloquent admonition to seize the future, whether in reference to the Habs or the Quebecois nation. This little essay is not about separatism, a word which has no meaning in the context of mutual sovereignty. It is not about independence, which begs to know who and from what. It is about common sense and co-operation, and a future where we cease to be a burden to each other and instead become allies.

Where's Barbara Budd!

2010-05-12T09:48:00.001-07:00

Without Barbara Budd, As It Happens is just another radio program. How on earth could CBC brass possibly have made such an egregious error. When a radio program achieves the status of cultural tradition, leave the bloody thing alone! The banter is gone, the wit and the warmth are gone. I did an informal survey of listeners: every single one was irritated to outraged by the arbitrary removal of Barbara from the show. Shame on CBC for its insensitivity to listeners' preferences. She was part of our collective Canadian lifestyle. CBC has turned many fans into mere listeners. Lingering over dinner to hear AIH appears to be a thing of the past. If the brass don't answer to listeners, just who the Hell do they answer to?

Sex, Violence, and Other Mysteries

2010-04-29T06:50:00.000-07:00

This was something I posted on a DorothyL listserve discussion (April 26) which I thought might be of interest:

Long before I started writing mysteries, I published a book called Sex and Violence in the Canadian Novel. After a brief flurry of sales, it died a merciful death. In the first of my Quin and Morgan mysteries, Still Waters, there is a strong sexual component. A rape scene, crucial to character and plot, is presented with retrained brutality that underscores the lasting horror. The description of a male’s first affair is emotionally graphic and a subsequent fantasy tryst is emotionally empty; in the latter, the sex is graphic, in the former it is muted, tender, and fraught with innocence. My point: sex is character, sex is plot. When it’s neither, as in life, it’s just sex.

The third novel in the series, “The Gibraltar Coordinates” which is due out next spring, is more of an action-packed thriller (the second is gothic, the fourth a drawing-room puzzle). There’s lots of intimacy and affection but little on-stage sex; there’s violence enough to keep the wheels moving fast, but never separable from character-in-plot.

There are no rules, each representation is different, an integral part of the composition. But if sex is difficult to write, or awkward to read, it shouldn’t be there. If violence titillates when it should terrify, it’s extraneous.

Stranded at Hazlitt's in Soho

2010-04-20T14:49:00.000-07:00

There are worse ways to be stranded abroad than in Hazlitt’s Hotel in Soho. I’d rather be home about now, since in a couple of days there’s a mystery gala in Picton, being held in association with Books & Co, where I was to be one of the writers to read a bit and talk about murder. I’m assuming Rick Blechta, Mary Jane Mafini, Michael Blair, John David Carpenter, Vicki Delany, Violette Malan, and Janet Kellough will still be there for the April 22^nd event. I’ll still be at Hazlitt’s.

London is beautiful at this time of year but we’re being held captive by the volcanic activities in Iceland. We were due to fly out this morning. We’d booked in here for our last night away, after totally low-end accomodation in London and Paris over the last couple of weeks. Now we can’t get away. The décor is 18^th century, William Hazlitt, the great essayist lived here, and the ‘library’ has autographed books by previous literary guests like Umberto Ecco and J.K. Rowling. I’m sure in due course at least one of my mysteries will find its way onto their august shelves, along with Beverley’s book, Inventing Easter Island.

By chance Bev and I bumped into Kirk Howard, my publisher at Dundurn Press, and Beth Bruder, VP of Sales and Marketing, at the London Book Fair. The whole affair was pretty low key because of the flight limitations. Still, it was great to be so far from home and talk about Canadian publishing. Like us, they’re probably anxious to get home, and yet it’s hard not to feel the excitement of being stranded. For Bev and I, a few more days at Hazlitt’s will be a luxury we can neither afford nor forego.

Yann Martel and What’s Her Name

2010-04-07T15:59:00.000-07:00

As a writer, you have a better chance of falling into a pot hole on main street and ending up among talking rabbits and erasable cats than snaring a publisher’s advance in the millions. Yet it happens. Yann Martel is apparently getting somewhere around three million for his new novel. More incredibly, a woman in Nanaimo is pulling in over a million for her first, repeat, first novel. Yes, it does happen.

Don’t forget, this is the writer’s own money. The publisher is betting the writer’s work will bring in enough to make it up out of his or her earnings. It’s a gamble, since if the book fails to earn big bucks, the publisher is out of pocket, not the writer. But it is also something of a self-fulfilling prophecy since the publisher has a vested interest in extravagant marketing, beginning, of course, by flaunting the huge advance.

So why am I writing about this? Because most writers are professionals: that means by definition that there is not a direct correlation between what we do and what we make. Some medical doctors bring in more than Yann Martel, some work as an act of grace in places God forgot. Most writers are artists: that means by definition that there is not a direct correlation between what we make and what we are paid, whether it’s music, sculpture, or a book worth reading. When a professional artist like Martel strikes it rich, it’s not because he’s the best, but because he’s very good at doing what we do and vicariously I’ll dine out on his fortune. As for those writers like the woman on Vancouver Island who candidly admits to writing as a business project or Dan Brown who markets a product with amazing success, I wish them well, the same as if they’d won the lottery or invented a widget and struck it rich. Good for them but it’s got nothing to do with me and my life.

I write mysteries, Martel writes parables. We’re both listening to the world and we hear some of the same voices, share some of the same visions. Well done, Yann. I’ll enjoy my dinner at your imagined expense.

Anthem Grammar Appalling

2010-03-05T07:21:00.000-08:00

“True patriot love in all thy sons command.” By all means, let’s change the words to “in all of us,” but maybe we could fix the grammar in the process. No-one seems concerned but, dammit, the line, even now, should read “commands.” It is patriot love that is commanded, not the sons who command or the sons’ command. It may not sound quite so mellifluous to say, “in all thy sons commands,” but changed to “in all of us commands,” it sounds even better than the present syntactically-challenged doggerel.

Clare Hitchens, a lovely blog

2010-02-21T10:19:00.000-08:00

Check out:

http://adventbooks.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/clare-hitchens-discusses-her-love-of-canadian-crime-fiction/

I just discovered this lovely blog by Clare Hitchens, although it was posted some time ago. What a beautiful lift on a quiet February day. She apparently works in Waterloo County, my home turf. Her first name is the same as my granddaughter's, named after the Clare family from Preston. Her welcome appreciation is not nepotism, however, since we've never met (except genetically, perhaps). In any case, I'll quote a few lines:

Recently I’ve been exploring Dundurn’s great collection of Canadian mysteries. ... How lucky we are that John Moss has turned his brilliant academic mind to writing mysteries. His Miranda Quin and David Morgan of the Toronto Police service are a different breed of detectives. Intellectual and culturally sophisticated, they wrestle with both existential problems and their feelings for each other. Their adventures take them through the streets of Toronto and into the wilds of rural southern Ontario. Moss has written two titles so far (Still Waters and Grave Doubts) and I hope there will be many more.

That Is NOT Who!

2010-02-19T07:11:00.000-08:00

Eric Duhatschek, Globe and Mail, February 18, 2010:

"Hiller, the Anaheim Ducks' goaltender that made J.S. Giguere expendable, is a tall, fluid lefthander that many of the Western Conference-based players on Team Canada see frequently."

Dr. That and the Death of Who

2010-01-30T08:45:00.000-08:00

I have just deleted my extensive collection pertaining to ‘that,’ the usurper. ‘Who’ as a relative pronoun is dead. I’ve been gathering the most egregious examples of its passing for the last few weeks. This morning, however, the ever-fastidious Russell Smith gives ‘that’ his imprimatur in a Globe and Mail column about asking guests to pitch in with dinner. If Smith has gone over, then my list of CBC newswriters, Maclean’s scribes, and scripted politicians is redundant. In the abject spirit of surrender, I quote Mr. Smith: “The separate kitchen is really only useful for those with servants that can cook and bring out food …” I can hear my mother whispering urgently from the celestial wings, “who, who, who, Mr. Smith.” Russell Smith is a brilliant short story writer and, as Inger Ash Wolfe, an intriguing mystery novelist. If ‘that’ is good enough for him, then ‘who’ must be laid to rest with my mother’s other obsessions about the abuses of ‘I’ as an object and the pluralization of ‘there’s.’ Who am I to disagree? Or, should it be, “that’s me who disagrees,” Mom? There’s two choices, eh. And no, it shouldn't be "the Death of Whom" in my title!

Everybody Drinks, Nobody Thinks

2010-01-19T08:39:00.000-08:00

A reviewer paid me a gratifying compliment recently by suggesting the relationship between Miranda and Morgan in my mysteries is akin to Hammett's Nick and Nora in “The Thin Man” series. It turns out there isn't a series, just one novel stretched beyond recognition in a succession of movies. Like Hammett's best known work, The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Thin Man (1934) is familiar as a cultural icon, but I had never read either so I thought I'd give them a try.

Dashiell Hammett's characters are "louche." I've always wanted to use that word in a sentence because it feels right, but I had to look it up to be sure it meant "appealingly decadent." Everybody drinks. Nobody thinks. They smoke. They sleep in late, and around, with a dismaying lack of vigour. The men are effete, the tough guys included. They giggle about getting tight and they gossip. Women are girls, the bright ones like baubles. The obsessive use of slang mires the plots in another era and threatens to asphyxiate them.

Hammett captured or even helped to create the zeitgeist of his time. Times change and his writing seems louche. It's worth remembering how profoundly important Hammett is in the history of the mystery genre, especially its American version. We owe him, readers and writers, alike. But that doesn’t mean we have to read him: there are so many writers out there, so many recent novels worth reading. Unlike the canonical ‘literary’ texts, the foundational works in genre writing aren’t essential reading to appreciate what’s being written now.

Judging the Judges

2010-01-08T09:01:00.000-08:00

One of the mysteries that has interested me most over the years has been the absurd and elusive criteria for selecting judges for book awards in this country. Thomas Hodd has written a superb essay, published in The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, January 5^th, in which he boldly argues just this. Check it out.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/you-cant-judge-a-book-by-its-scholar/article1419560/#

Before taking up writing mysteries as a suitable vocation for a retiring fellow like myself, I taught Canadian literature for decades and toiled in academe as a literary critic. I was in the business of exercising taste and judgement to illuminate literary quality. There are scholars and there are critics: scholars don’t judge but critics do.

There are critics and reviewers. Reviewers express opinions. Critics make judgements based on an informed sensibility and educated imagination. Some reviewers are good critics, some critics are good reviewers. Critics are accountable, at least to themselves. That’s why they make good judges.

I have yet to see a literary critic, whose life work is grounded in cultural and literary context, on the list of Giller judges or Governor General’s Award judges. Instead, we have writers, their friends, and apparently ‘representative’ readers. If you traced the connections among winners and judges over the years, you might be appalled, or at least embarrassed. If you interviewed representative readers, and asked for their criteria, apart from the fact that they read quite a bit, or about the depth of their knowledge or the breadth of their critical awareness, you’d generally feel insulted.

Consider the recent bleating of Victoria Glendinning. How is this person in any way qualified to make an informed and educated judgement when she is neither informed nor educated in relation to the works being judged (see my blog below re Glendinning).

Consider Justin Trudeau a few years back, championing Wayne Johnston on “Canada Reads,” capitulating to the spokesperson for Hubert Aquin. Why? For political expediency. I doubt Trudeau had read Prochain Episode. I’m bloody well sure, listening to him, he didn’t understand it either as a work of literature or for its anarchist political exhortations.

Isn’t it about time the experts were called in. Writers are the worst of all possible judges. If they could explain what it is about art that makes it work, they’d be essayists. If they knew their own minds, they’d probably be lawyers. If they exercised good taste and judgement they’d be teachers. Do you want brain surgery done by someone who has had deep thoughts, someone who has had numerous cranial invasions, or by a trained surgeon?

Gloria Glendinning, How Quaint

2010-01-08T06:58:00.000-08:00

I'm re-posting this from early October. It seems to have been dumped (gremlins, not censorship), and my blog later today will refer back to it:

It is irritating enough to endure the condescension of a British writer who knows virtually nothing about Canadian culture, but when that writer is Victoria Glenndining, a novelist, biographer, and critic of note, who otherwise commands considerable respect, it is sad. She was, after all, educated at Oxford and many of us weren’t. For those not up on the international furor, Glendinning recently served on the Giller Prize jury and subsequently, in The Financial Times, September 12, showed clearly why she should have graciously declined. As a mystery writer, I don’t expect ever to be subject to her judgement, literary or otherwise. As an ex-critic specializing in Canadian literature, a cultural theorist of modest achievement, and the author of several obscure books of postmodern metafiction, written while I was still harbouring “literary” pretentions, I am indifferent to the whingeing twaddle of a disaffected elderly twit. But, I really do resent stupidity, especially when I as a Canadian am its victim. Ignorance is one thing but an utter absence of civility and common sense is another. It is abusive.

Glendinning thinks we use funny words like “eavestrough” and “toque, “ and we sit in funny devices we have the temerity to call Muskoka chairs (pause for laughter). Our writers write about “families down the generations with multiple points of view and flashbacks to Granny’s youth in the Ukraine or wherever.” The Americans, who are, of course, exactly like us, “do not bang on so about their heritage and antecedents.” We have a tendency to author “unbelievably dreadful” novels, many of which come from, and worse still, are set in, funny sounding places like “Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland. That’s maybe because small publishers too are now subsided, and they proliferate.” (Damned profligate Canadians!) “If you want to get your novel published, be Canadian.”

And if you know nothing about Canadian cultural history but still want to comment on it, you may get your graceless tripe published in The Financial Times. Apparently all it takes is a degree from Oxford and a reputation of sorts.

THE BEST DIVES I NEVER DID

2009-12-17T08:35:00.000-08:00

We just returned from a dive holiday in the Galapagos Islands. We had planned for three years for this, and it was worth every penny spent, every moment of anguish as we came to terms with the fact that in this most sacred and inaccessible diving destination on the planet, I couldn’t dive. I say “we,” because I think it was almost as hard for Bev to see me standing at the rail of the dive boat, as it was for me, while she sped off in the zodiac to plunge into awesome currents and be surrounded by sea lions hell-bent on playing among the divers and fifteen-foot hammerhead sharks driven by curiosity (not hunger) to swim among them, checking them out. I had been preparing for this for years, picking up my scuba instructors certifications from PADI and SDI, the two leading dive associations, as well as logging five hundred dives. But last spring I experienced a lung problem while diving in the Saint Lawrence, and that, according to the doctors, was that.

So. Watching Bev dive was almost as good as doing it myself. Being with a group I have dived with for years was the continuation of an ongoing adventure. And topside, the Galapagos are a moving experience. We got to Wolf and Darwin, islands few people see because we were on a specially licensed boat. We walked among sea lions (huge seals with ears), so close you could literally bend over and touch the nursing pups (which we didn’t; only the three Russians attached to our group felt sufficiently entitled, despite park rules. The entire archipelago is a park). We chatted face to face with comical blue-footed boobies (like large sleek seagulls with personalities). And we admired the ancient tortoises on Santa Cruz before dining out in Puerto Ayora, a modern town of fifteen thousand so upscale we window-shopped to see what cruise ship customers buy.

Sometimes not doing something, hard as it may be, is an adventure in itself. I didn’t dive. I wrote wrote wrote. And watched. And looking at the instant replays on cameras, hearing the chatter of a dozen divers, keyed up before they went in, elated when they returned to the ship, it was almost like doing it myself. In fact, sitting here with snow outside the window, I’d swear I’d been face to face with hammerheads, less than a body’s length between us, only last week. No? Well, Bev was!

To Review the Reviewer

2009-11-28T09:36:00.000-08:00

Over the years I’ve reviewed a lot of fiction for a variety of publications, ranging from The Globe and Mail to Canadian Literature. That was an extension of my job, teaching university and working as a critic. Now, my major occupation is writing mysteries. I think my past has made me less anxious about reviewer response to my own work and at the same time more pleased by the accolades. But I find myself in a curious position. I still write the occasional review. Do I review as a critic or as a creative writer? A mystery writer? Or as an objective reader ( even though there is no such thing)? Mystery reviewers, on the whole, tend to be more generous than literary reviewers: concerned less with poetics than plot, and focused more on character than characterization, more on clarity than originality, more on suspense and surprise than on illumination or catharsis. Should my reviews be based on what I try to do as a writer, or what I like, personally, as a reader? Or on what my readership, limited as it may be, expects? What if generosity and candour are incompatible? I might as well keep on writing reviews; it helps hone my skills, writing mysteries. But should I publish them, or consign them to the bottom drawer (if I still had a desk, which in the age of laptops seems anachronistic)? Don’t know. Just thinking out loud. That’s what reviewers do. Writers think and feel and wrestle with copula verbs and ineffable truths. Thinking is good; too much, though, leaves the soul dried as autumn leaves. So: a revision. Good reviewers are writers. I think I’ll continue to do both.

Of shoes and ships ...

2009-10-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

…and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings.

I said to Bev at dinner tonight, I hope it’s teaming rain tomorrow, then I can stay in and write all day. I paused, then said: I hope it’s warm and sunny tomorrow, then I can go out and work on my wall (a stone wall that I’d like to finish before it snows). How lucky am I, how incredibly lucky! Nearing seventy and there’s so much to do. A new novel, a new wall. The idea is to make them both seem inevitable, like they’ve been here, in the world, forever.

Downtown Bookstore: Owen Sound

On October 17^th I sat in the window of the Downtown Bookstore, almost literally, and Hazel Lyder, the congenial and energetic owner, served coffee while I chatted with people, and sold some books. It was a wonderfully warm and intimate event. My brother Steve and his wife, Janmarie, arranged for me to be there. Among those turning up, a dear old friend, Jack Morgan, and his wife Linda, whom I’ve known almost as long, appeared on the scene. Jack and I lived next door to each other in residence at Huron College, UWO, in 1958. We’ve known each other fifty years, plus. Now, does he remember every name in our corridor? Let’s start with Winston Nelson, from British Guiana, who was on the other side of my room, due north. When you’ve known someone so long, it’s hard to believe you don’t remember the exact same things. Linda was great at the event, answering questions and promoting; she should be working for Dundurn Press. Jack, of course, knows what I’m writing about, even when I’m not always too clear, myself.

Writers Reading: Westport

October 25th found Bev and I in Westport, Ontario. It’s a town to remember. We parked and wandered down a few inviting sidestreets, looking for a place to eat before the reading, which was to be held at the Westport United Church. When we passed people they would nod, some said hello, everyone smiled. What a beautiful, gracious, congenial town. And the reading, organized by Stillwater Books and the charming and enterprising Steve Scanlon, along with the Westport Arts Council, represented by Norman Peterson, Brin Jones, and others, was a mega-success. I led off the program, followed by the irrepressibly entertaining Mary Jane Mafini. After a break for the fifty or sixty members of our audience to refresh themselves, Barbara Fradkin talked and read from her powerful, Ottawa based, novels, followed by Giles Blunt, who likewise talked and gave a great performance, doing a theatrical reading from No Such Creature. It was a balanced afternoon, fun for us as writers, and, I think for the organizers and attendees, alike.

Prime Crime: Ottawa

Next Saturday, October 31^st, I’m doing a signing as the guest of Linda Wiken at her bookstore on Banks Street. If anyone in Canada knows Canadian mystery novels, it’s Linda. It should be a good time.

Owen Giving Thanks

2009-10-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

My grandson, Owen, is in grade three and lives in Vancouver (with Simon and Charlie, and their mom and dad, Laura and Fred). When I read his essay, saying thank-you to his parents, I was overwhelmed. He's one lucky boy, but his parents are even luckier. Putting this on my blog is my own way of sharing and saying thanks!

Thank you for transportation. Thank you for giving me food. Thank you for giving me a shelter. Thank you for taking work off and stay home when I am sick. thank you for buying me toys. Thank you for letting me have sleepovers and play dates. Thank you for playing with me when I am lonely. Thank you for giving me life. Thank you for having birthday parties for me. Thank you for helping me with my homework. Thank you for making me feel safe. Thank you for buying us a Christmas tree. Thank you for taking me places. Thank you for buying me clothes. Thank you for helping me on things I don’t know. thank you for helping me learn things. Thank you for taking care of me. Thank you for giving me soccer and field hockey lessons. Thank you for getting me sports equipment. Thank you for getting me a Nintendo Wii. Thank you for gettign me a computer. Thank you for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Thank you for dropping me off at school. Thank you for taking me to restaurants. Thank you for taking me to markets. Thank you for helping me be a better person. Thank you for giving me the name Owen.

Graves Matter

2009-10-06T08:32:00.000-07:00

It’s been quite a while, now, since The Hamilton Spectator has published a column by Don Graves, one of the premier critics in the country, and the only reviewer of note to focus on Canadian mystery titles. Recently in the Word on the Street festival in Toronto I sold quite a few books. Almost every sale was to a reader of either Margaret Cannon in The Globe and Mail or Don Graves in The Hamilton Spectator or on The Spectator’s website. Mystery novels have huge sales in Canada and, although often ignored in favour of so-called “literary” writing, some of negligible significance, they need and deserve a sound critical representation. Graves provides this, not just for Hamilton but for the whole country. I’ve never met the man and, yes, I have received good reviews from him, but even if I hadn’t I would continue to check him out for advice on what to read and how it might be read. Let’s hope his absence is of short duration.

Westport: Writers Reading October 25th

2009-10-02T16:52:00.000-07:00

The Second Annual Writers Reading event, sponsored by the Westport Arts Council and Stillwater Books is being held on Sunday, October 25th at Westport United Church between 1:00 and 5:pm. I'll be reading in very good company. Giles Blunt will be there. I've never met him but I'm a fan. The irrepressible Mary Jane Mafini will also be reading, along with Barbara Fradkin, another very highly regarded mystery writer I haven't met. If you're in the area, drop in. It should be a great afternoon.

Writer in the Window: Owen Sound

2009-09-26T06:57:00.000-07:00

Through the good offices of my brother Steve, I'm scheduled to be at a signing in the Downtown Bookstore in Owen Sound from 11:00 a.m to noon on Saturday, October 17th, as part of this dynamic bookstore's Independent's Day celebration. If you're in the area, drop in, or drop in to the Bookstore anytime, it's worth the effort. With it's café and fine selection, it's a major attraction in Owen Sound.

Word on the Street

2009-09-22T06:15:00.000-07:00

The annual Word on the Street national book and magazine extravaganza is being held next Sunday, September 27th, in Toronto, Kitchener, Halifax, and Vancouver.

I'll be signing in the wonderfully named "Writer's Block" at the Crime Writers of Canada booth, WB15, on the Queen's Park circle in Toronto from noon to 1:00 p.m., sharing the stage with Howard Shrier.

Other crime writers will be signing throughout the day, including Vicki Delany, Rick Blechta, and Elizabeth Duncan.

The festival is a major event, even for those who don't read mysteries (which is a mystery in itself). Hope to see you there.

Images That Shape Our Convictions

2009-09-21T07:16:00.000-07:00

Last night on the news: two images that speak to each other in a cacaphony of voices I don’t comprehend. Video of Private Jonathan Couturier in a flag draped casket, being brought home from Afghanistan. Jonathan was the 131^st Canadian soldier to die in a war he had recently described as a waste. Another image in the news, one of children celebrating the end of Ramadan in Kabul. Only it wasn’t children, it was boys—not a single girl among the jubilant throng of boys, not a single woman in evidence among the men.

Writing in Sand

2009-09-19T07:28:00.000-07:00

I want to share an astonishing video. It shows art being created in the most ephemeral of media imaginable, tells a complex story with heart-breaking simplicity, and defies those who would limit great art to particular genres or specific contexts. If we could only suspend time without making it meaningless.

http://www.fark.com/cgi/vidplayer.pl?IDLink=4575494

Crimes and Punishment

2009-09-16T09:59:00.001-07:00

(My response to the escalating and arbitrary divisions between “literature” and “genre” writing, especially in Canada. I promise my next entry will be more chatty.)

The division between so called genre writing and literary writing is arbitrary. Alice in Wonderland is fantasy fiction. Orwell’s Animal Farm is fable; his 1984 is dystopian fiction. Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a horror story; Atwood’s Alias Grace is a mystery. Frankenstein and Dracula are masterpieces of horror, the former speculative and the latter psychological. James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is speculative fiction, Oryx and Crake is science fiction, although Atwood demurs on the facile categorization. Who would presume to deny P.D. James the epithet, ‘literary writer,’ despite her penchant for writing mysteries. Morley Callaghan showed a lifelong fascination with the thematic implications of crime. Michael Ondaatje continues to do so. So do I.

There is good writing and there is bad writing. Some ‘literary’ writing is execrable. I have served on award juries and been the editor of a literary journal generously funded by the Canada Council. I have read some brilliant literary writing by Canadian writers and plodded through a great deal of bad. Some ‘crime’ writing is bad; but some is profoundly well written. To dismiss the good with the bad on the basis of perceived formulaic restrictions is like refusing to buy a house because it has windows, doors, and a roof.

After a career as a literary critic, I have taken up the profession of mystery writer. This means I write mysteries, and these are intended to be no less literary than imaginative works I previously published with the House of Anansi, Cormorant Books, and Turnstone Press, all Canadian literary presses supported by various granting agencies. Recently, Giles Blunt turned from crime writing to publish a ‘literary’ novel. The powerful and poetic language, the psychological depths, the brilliant uses of locale to explore character and develop plot that are present in his mysteries enhance his newest work. Should it be considered less, or his crime novels more? All writing is genre writing of one form or another; all fiction follows certain conventions, subverts others. There are many ways to explore the human condition from a Canadian perspective. Writing about murder is one of them.

Writing Local

2009-09-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Some genre writing, particularly mysteries, are set nowhere, with a few map names thrown in to suggest the contrary. These are often as successful as they are ephemeral. Mysteries that rise above the limitations of genre, where ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ converge, are set in real places, even if the real places are made up. Consider how actual and accessible the settings of Louise Penny’s novels are, and how intrinsically important to plot and character development. The Eastern Townships come alive in her writing as a suitable scene for murder. Ross Pennie’s Hamilton, Giles Blunt’s thinly disguised North Bay, these are locales that extend beyond the edges of the page.

I don’t write as a Canadian writer about a country called Canada. I write about the village of Blair where I grew up, the city of Toronto, where I have lived from time to time, the familiar backroads and country places of Ontario. From my own experience, living, traveling, reading, imagining, I try to locate my fiction as precisely as possible.

I write, in an upcoming mystery, The Gibraltar Coordinates, about Easter Island, which Bev and I have visited several times, and she’s written about in her book Inventing ‘Easter Island,’ and about Baffin Island, where we’ve hiked extensively, described in my book, Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape. But I also write about London, New York, Berlin, and other places, not just because I’ve been there but because I hope to connect my readers with the particularities of place that allow for larger themes than genre writing might seem to admit.

Truly engaging fiction is local. Jane Austen knew that. So did Dashiell Hammett. So does Dan Brown. You can’t have big themes without the small details. You can’t generate moving drama, or amusing comedy, or romance, or intrigue, among geographic generalizations and evasions. From the perspective of someone who writes about murder, I hate to think death is ever a small theme, even when explored with wit as a thrilling or amusing diversion.

Roasting the Pig

2009-08-31T07:01:00.000-07:00

Like everyone else, I’ve been through good times and bad. Among the best have been my adventures in diving. Among the worst, an incident last spring that brought an end to my diving career. My first scuba gear was a reluctant Christmas present from my parents when I was fifteen, in 1955. My final dive was in the Thousand Islands among close friends associated with Adventure Divers in Peterborough, Ontario, a dive shop, travel agency, and virtual friendship centre where I’ve been a diving instructor for the last few years.

Yesterday afternoon, Pepé and Sherry, who own the shop, co-hosted their annual pig roast and potluck with Marybeth and Dave. Bev and I drove out with mixed feelings. I’m very fond of my diving buddies and have felt pretty low about not diving with them again. We have shared some amazing experiences. These are people who have become important to me in ways difficult to describe. My life has been in their hands at depths of 130 feet, and theirs in mine. However different we may be on the surface, down there our connection is based on intimate and absolute trust.

With thirty or forty close friends gathered round, a presentation was made to mark my untimely transition to non-diver status—as a celebration of the good things we’ve shared, not a lament for what’s been lost. I’m a writer; nothing is ever lost, it just gets turned into fiction. When it was time to leave, I wanted to hug each and every person there. I may have missed a few. Sorry. I’d like to name you all. But if I forgot a single name, I’ll feel bloody miserable. So, I’ll just say thanks. Thank you for the generosity of your affection, for the good times we’ve had in exotic places and in damned cold water close to home, for welcoming me into your special community, for being fun. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

The Public Writer

2009-08-29T11:07:00.000-07:00

Writing fiction is a very private act, meant to reach as wide an audience as possible. An elderly friend of mine, long since dead (I supposed he died younger than I am now), insisted that's what drove so many writers to drink. Hugh Garner was an accomplished and successful writer, and stayed sober through each writing project, then drank himself into oblivion as he went through the procedures of being a public figure in order to sell books. He accepted this as the natural order of things.

For myself, I'm finding sustaining a public profile both exhausting and exhilarating. I look at a mystery writer like Louise Penny and marvel at how open and accessible she is. In trying to do the same, I seem to be making innumerable trips to bookstores, in an effort to make myself known. I trust the novels are good, but if no-one reads them ...

I'm a mystery writer. It doesn't count if I wrote quite successfully in the past in other genres. So, I present myself as a mystery writer. It can be tremendous fun, and occasionally quite humbling. I was practically ejected from the premises of a bookstore in Kitchener by an assistant manager not out of her teens. On the other hand, I have been warmly received by stores from Brockville to Cambridge, Picton and Port Hope to Guelph and Huntsville, Hamilton, Bracebridge, Belleville, and Kingston. Sometimes, stores have neither of my mysteries in stock, or perhaps one or two copies. Nevertheless, many smaller independent stores have been very gracious but, then, perhaps more surprisingly, so have Chapters and McNally Robinson.

Driving hundreds of kilometres to "market" a book or two hasn't driven me to excessive drink, although occasionally to a glass of wine or two. As I drive around, I've been lining up signings, and have been invited to a book club in Peterborough and a writers' festival in Westport (and perhaps to others, if they work out). Bev usually goes with me, so we have good times, hanging out and seeing Ontario. Most of my "marketing" efforts are necessarily in Ontario because that's where I live.

After a day or two on the road, it's always good getting back to "Stonewood," and to Miranda Quin and David Morgan—it's always a relief to find they're still there, waiting for me.

Titles

2009-08-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

Two more Quin and Morgan mysteries are virtually complete. I'm wrestling with which should go next. One is more in the thriller genre, taking Miranda to Easter Island and Morgan to Baffin Island, before they meet half way through, back in Toronto, to resolve plot complexities with international implications. The other is closer to a British drawing room mystery, set in Toronto and Muskoka cottage country, but with resonance connecting the quirky members of a Society devoted to Shakespeare's contemporary, Francis Bacon, to a much larger world. Both still feature Quin and Morgan!

Titles seem to take as much time and thought as re-writes. Getting just the right one that will attract new readers, not put off familiar readers, and sum up the novel without giving too much away, is a daunting task.

For the thriller, I've tried Crimes of the Early Morning (too artsy), Killing People Is Wrong (too whimsical), Murder Casts a Long Shadow (too melodramatic). I think I've settled on The Gibraltar Coordinates (intriguingly enigmatic, I hope).

For the drawing room mystery, I think I've settled on The Dead Scholar. I've tried a lot of others, including Dead Reckoning (my publisher thinks it's too common, although it has only been used once, in 2005, and once in 1978), and, my favourite, A Goodly Huge Cabinet (an allusion to Bacon's notion that all informed people should have a "cabinet of curiosities" to keep the souvenirs of their lives for safekeeping—too esoteric). And others, as they say, too numerous to mention.

Now, I need to decide, which comes next, after the psychological emphasis of Still Waters and the gothic play in Grave Doubts??

What's in a name?

2009-08-14T08:36:00.000-07:00

Now that I have a blog site to go with my updated website, I'm a little more conscious of "my" presence on the web. When I Google my own name I find it really isn't mine at all. There was a John E. Moss U.S. Congressman of some note (I'm John E (for Errington), as well), and there is a John Moss serving life in Arkansas whose story is heart-wrenching, if his claim of wrongful conviction is accurate. He is worth checking out on compassionate grounds. John Moss is the 10,878th most common name in the U.S., with 56 living in California and none living in North Dakota (statistics for Canada unavailable). There is a picture of a tombstone on Google marking the grave of a John Moss born in 1604, who died 103 years later, in 1707 (I have a number of centenarians in my family, all women and all on my mother's side). And there is a Jon Moss out there who was a drummer for Boy George and Culture Club and for a band called The Nipple Erectors, as well as Adam and the Ants and The Damned (a lot to live up to, although Jon isn't John). I think I've come up with a genealogy project based on names, not genes.

First Entry

2009-08-10T11:06:00.000-07:00

August 10/o9

This is my first entry; I'm still setting things up. At this point I'm a little uncertain about who will be reading this. What I'm intending is to write whatever comes to mind in relation to writing mysteries, particularly my own. Quin and Morgan occupy a real place in my day to day life as I work ahead on the series. But I also plan to comment on mysteries in general and how they are crafted in books, television, and movies. If effect, I'll be posting the occasional review.

Meanwhile, back to work. (Whaling captains used to sign off on their log entries, "and so ends this day." I love the vaguely ominous sound of closure in those words, but my day isn't over!)